Month: April 2013

Though many of our fellow color lovers to the north and midwest may still be experiencing snow here in San Francisco spring is springing. So to distract ourselves from the constant sneezing and itchy eyes that allergy season brings and to take our mind of spring cleaning we have decided to kick off the new season with some decorating ideas. How you spruce up your home after the long wet winter? Cut flowers? Garlands? Change the artwork around? Here are some of our ideas!

To make your home feel lively and feel fresh try decorative paper stands featuring spring motifs to add a festive feel for April and May. A lot can be accomplished with a dash of pattern and color.

If you’re a more advanced paper crafter you could try these delicate spherical doilies. Depending on the colors you choose your home could be in for a bold splash or a pastel breath of spring.

There are wreaths as well. Though traditionally thought of as a winter holiday classic you can hang one on your door in any season. If you are bathing in the warm California sunshine, you may be surrounded by over-burdened lemon trees. It seems lemonade can simply not be made as fast as these trees produce so why not use the extras for your decorating project. No lemon trees around? Collecting newly green branches or wild flowers from your area will give your wreath that added local feel.

Along with cut flowers there is the time honored decorating standard of budding branches and the all green floral arrangement to consider. Adding dramatic sprigs of green can help envigorate the feeling of a room. You can use anything from a cutting of those thornless vines creeping over you back yard, some textural wild weedlings, or even left overs from your tree pruning project.

Even if you are still stuck in the snow with little green to harvest you can always make your own colorful leaves! Whether all green or multicolored, a few dry branches and twigs can bring the springtime inside without all that pesky water. Just cut, glue and arrange!

What are you planning for this years spring spruce? Let us know in comments and from everyone here at Colour Studio: Have a colorful season!

Frank Lloyd Wright some would say is the most well known architect of the last hundred years, and one of his best loved projects is the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. It is a twisting, white shelled beauty of a building, an inverted cone with sloping sides that contrasts nicely with the perpetually upright verticality of New York’s highrises. But did you know that white was not originally Wrights plan for the museum?

In fact Wright didn’t like white and in his drawings for the museum the colors were anything but stark white. In various sketches dating back to the 1940’s Wright proposed black, pink, peach, and even a striking cherry red. Red was a color common to Wright’s earlier work including his well known residential building Fallingwater.

But even world class architect Wright had a client to please and Hilla Rebay, Solomon R. Guggenheim’s art advisor, vetoed the red idea saying to Wright“Red is a color which displeases S. R. G. as much as it does me.“

Wright finally relented and gave up his red, and Rebay offered this help in a 1945 letter, “Yellow marble,” she wrote, “and if not, green.” But neither would come to be because as the building neared completion, marble was deemed too expensive and was scrapped for a simpler creamy yellow paint option. In the intervening years the building has been repainted paler and paler until in 1992 when a major expansion was completed the Guggenheim came to be its now trademark white with a dash of gray.

When the building was to be repainted in 2007, the Landmark Preservation Commission did paint forensics, carefully removing paint from the exterior walls. They found 11 different layers revealing shades of white, yellow, and even beige but after much debate the Commission voted to keep the now iconic platinum white.

Though we can only imagine (or photoshop) what the museum would have looked like in a different skin, this sunset time lapse can give us one idea. What do you think? Is white as the main stay of serious architecture just another hold over from modernisms chromophobia or it is a truly contemporary blank slate for the big ideas of the times? Color is never a simple thing, but sometimes more history, and frankly controversy, than you would imagine lies under that crisp white exterior.